The Power of Scorecards in Real Estate

Welcome back to the Business Freedom Podcast. This is Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School, co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors in Charlotte, North Carolina. Today is all about the power of scorecards. Yes, these are like simple spreadsheets that will change your world if you understand how to run them at a very, very high level. So I want to take a little bit of time, I want to unpack the importance of scorecards. And when I'm talking scorecards, I'm talking about tracking, you know, seven to 15 numbers in a particular, in a certain area of your business. So if it's marketing or sales or operations or your team overall so that you know that your business is doing the right things. And I touched on this in a podcast called Stop the Insanity and Overwhelm and, and I decided to go deeper on it because I know it will be really helpful for all of you. I'm going to pull up my scorecard. I'm not going to go through it like, you know, variable by variable or number by number. And I want to just give you an idea of what we're tracking on a weekly basis and how that fits into a 90 day world, a quarter, how those quarters sort of tied together for our annual goals and then ultimately the measurables that we're working toward on our three year picture. So three year picture, one year plan, the 90 day world and then 13 weeks. So it's the 3190-13 if you hear me, hear me talk about it. And so we have done well. Let me go over the three things that I want to convince you all that spending a little bit of time tracking numbers in your business is really, really incredibly important. So number one is that scorecards, it eliminates pressure and noise. So as an entrepreneur, you are in a business owner, real estate team leader, you are in a position where you have a lot of stress. Typically, most real estate team leaders, they're in production, they now have administrative staff and salespeople, buyer agents. Typically in their world, you're managing overhead. So you're spending money on leads, you're spending money on physical office space. You're doing everything in your power to put all that together in a way where you can make a good return on your time and your money. And that's the shift from being a real estate agent to being a business owner. You're making that shift to can I put all these pieces together in the right way so that I can have this thing work out for me, you know, in terms of time, money and stress and that's that really precious equation that we talk about very often here on the podcast. More time, more money, and less stress. That's what we want as business owners. And so this gives you just a little bit of confidence. Scorecards do that. You're doing the right things and you're tracking the right things in your business. You set up the process once and then you basically just run it weekly. You know, it's a quarterly scorecard, so there's 13 weeks in every scorecard. That's number one, eliminates the noise and the overwhelm in your business. Number two is that it increases your confidence. I think I talked about this just here a second ago. You know, as a business owner, there's so much that can knock you off your game, and you need to do everything you can to protect your confidence as a business owner. I studied under Dan Sullivan for a period of time, and he has something that he calls the four C's, and it's confidence. Let me see if I can. Confidence. Courage. Capabilities. No, sorry. Commitment. Courage. Capabilities and confidence. And so I want to run you through it real quick because I think it's a valuable construct to sort of think about as a business owner. It's easy to make a commitment. I'll leave out the fact that a lot of people say they're going to do something and it's not really a commitment and they don't follow through. Here's why, though. You make a commitment. I'm going to grow my team from 500,000 to a million, and I'm going to get out of the buyer side of the business. Then the second C is the courage you need the courage to be able to take the steps, really the mental steps to be able to give up all of your buyers. Like, that's scary. You know, getting out of the thing that has probably made you money consistently and just deciding to get out of it is scary. And so do you have what it takes to push through that sort of uncomfortable part of the four C's process? That's courage. When you do the capabilities part is actually not hard. It's like, what do you really need to do to step out of buyer side production? Right. You need a buyer presentation. You need maybe some guidelines around how you like to show homes how you create urgency with buyers or get them to decide on the right home or negotiate a contract or do repair. Like, there's only so many things you possibly could do as a buyer agent. And, you know, so the capabilities part is typically not hard when you do that. When you make the commitment to, let's say in this case, grow the business and get out buyer side production, or let's just say the buyer side production was the commitment, by this date I'm going to be out of buyer side production. You go through the courage icky feeling and you push through it. You build the capability. By doing that, you increase your confidence because you actually did the thing you set out to do. Most people don't make commitments and they don't follow through. And a lot of people, when they make commitments, they don't get through the courage phase. So having scorecards increases your confidence because you set, you know, quarterly targets for important measurables in your business and you set out to achieve those targets over a quarter. And when you do that, it increases your confidence for the next quarter and it increases your team's confidence as well. Because scorecards are really important for your team to get behind and know what the score of the game is. And not just in like, you know, GCI close. There's all this great other leading indicators that you should be working towards. So that's number two. Number three, you can manage the business by data, not emotion. Like let's, let's use an example. And I'm looking at the scorecard now, our scorecard. Let's see you, let's say you're a full blown out of production team leader and you know, you challenge your listing partner, your listing specialist to, you know, sign a million dollars of potential new seller volume. So, so coming back, come back with over a million dollars a week of listing volume signed and it's not happening. You know, you, you can if you didn't know the data, this is an obvious one. Hopefully you track this one in your business. It's the leadingest indicator you could. Well, it's not the leadingest indicator. One of the most important ones though, controlling listing inventory. Right now we're averaging almost about a million dollars a week of seller signed. And this, we're six weeks in as I'm recording this into a quarter. Our goal though is a million five. So our listing team is not getting it done. There's no emotion behind it. So when I go to the listing team and talk about it, it's like, okay, well we need to be here because our budget, you know, everything that we're doing relies on us coming back with 1.5 million of listings every week. And that may be a different number for you. It could be 500,000. Whatever the number is, that's irrelevant. It's the fact that we're not hitting it now. Let's just talk about that issue and let's solve it. So that's just an example of how you don't have to really put a whole lot of emotion in there. It's just an issue with the business and let's just solve it. What's going on? Are you getting in files? Are you, you know, contractor closing? Are you doing someone else's job? Are you, are you doing your new business development? Are you. Did you go on three appointments? And if you didn't get them, you know, maybe I can help you get them. That sort of thing. It allows you to directly address the problem and eliminate the emotion of it. And so that's 1, 2 and 3. So here are some things you could be measuring in your business. I'm going to run through this pretty quick. New seller, volume signed. I talked about that. New buyer volume signed. You could measure the GCI closed and pending of a particular lead source. So we track radio expired FSBOs and repeat referral on our team scorecard because we want to keep those top and center the number of listings activated. So these are active. Go on MLS. This is our one important measurable listing volume activated. So we're averaging 1.4 million this quarter so far against a goal of 1.5. So we're only a little bit behind there. We also measured the number of active listings, the number of activities active listings. That GCI represents, the number of price improvements in a week, total written volume, total GCI volume, Total volume closed. Total GCI closed. Our net cash flow from last week and our net cash position. So those are. That's more than you probably could have. We also track some set to met on the seller side and met to sign percentages on the seller and buyer side. So that'll give you an idea of the things you could measure in your business. This is critically important to do this. Please do not overlook it. And if you're not running your business by data, then you're flying this plane completely blind. If you get overwhelmed when I talk about data or scorecards and you're running a real estate team, you have other people in your life. You've got to figure out a way to know your numbers in your business. In real estate, B school, we have four key drivers, attract, convert, deliver and scale. In the scale driver, we have an accelerator that we call know your numbers. One of each of the four drivers has three accelerators. So it's one of 12 things we teach at a very high level in real Estate B school. And it's a missing link to most real estate team leaders, businesses. If that's you, you can't fly this thing blind because now you have other people in your world that are relying on you to do this properly. Go to Real Estate B School. Click on request. A free business growth strategy session. It's a simple conversation. It's 45 minutes with me. Talk about where you are today, where you want to be, and what is holding you back. And we blend in the time money stress equation as well. Like, are you working the amount of hours you want right now? Are you making the kind of money you want? Is your stress level at a level where you know it's acceptable? And if there's an area for improvement in all three of those and we can use your business to get you there, you know, we'll talk about our pilot program. 30 days of free coaching if you qualify, that's pretty much it. So go to realestatebschool.com and don't underestimate the power of scorecards. We'll see you over there. And what is holding you back? And we blend in the time money stress equation as well. Like, are you working the amount of hours you want right now? Are you making the kind of money you want? Is your stress level at a level where you know it's acceptable? And if there's an area for improvement in all three of those and we can use your business to get you there, you know, we'll talk about our pilot program. 30 days of free coaching if you qualify. And that's pretty much it. So go to real estate B school.